Forgiven & Forgotten!

"What a tremendous gift from God it is when we are able to forgive and let go of others ills against us - forigve & forget! This is the way our Lord deals with us, when we genuinely ask for forgiveness in repentance, God forgives & it is as if we never committed the sin which made us an enemy to Him in the first place.

I read a story the other day about a young seminary professor who would always introduce his New Testament class with a story from his past.

He and his dad were close and one day he told his dad a lie which hurt his father deeply. For years this young man grew older, but let the lie go unresolved. Guilt built up inside him about the lie and eventually a sense of tremendous remorse began to knaw inside of him. So, finally he sat down and wrote his dad a letter.

In the letter, he reminded his dad of the incident which he lied to him in case he did not remember. He explained in genuine tone his remorse over the lie and asked forgiveness without any explanation or excuse for the lie. The man went about his days when fairly quickly a reply letter came from his dad. It simply read, "Sure I remember the incident and YES your are forgiven!".

To the son this was a tremendious weight lifted from his shoulders as he had carried the weight of the unresolved lie for years. The further payoff came many years later when his mother and father both were much older, became ill, and died within a few months of each other.

He was the oldest child, so it was he duty to go to the parents home and start the process of sifting through their belongings. He ventured into the attic and found an old trunk with many momentos they had kept throughout their life together. Everything that was really precious to them monitarily was in that trunk.

As he was wiping tears away at the memories his parents had kept from he and his siblings childhood years, he came across that letter he had sent to his dad asking his forgiveness. He wiped the tears back, opened up the letter to re-read what he had written. As he turned the letter over on the backside was written in his father's own handwriting a word "FORGIVEN!" and it was underlined. His father had forgiven him and when his dad was done with something and beyond he would write it down and underline it meaning "finished".

By the letter being in that old trunk of mementos, with the word FORGIVEN written on it was his dads way of saying I have no unfinished business in this trunk. This was a tremendous gift his dad had given to him not only at the time of the reply letter, but years later when he found the letter as a treasure and the word FORGIVEN written on it. His dad had relinquished all traces of the hurt, the resentment, and the bitterness over the years.

In the same way, our heavenly Father will forgive us when we are genuinely remorseful and repentent before Him. I understand from my own experience, we sometimes need to ask for forgiveness from someone, and at other times we need to simply forgive someone and let go of the hurt and pain they might have caused. Either way forgiveness whether given by us or received by us is a gift from God to be treasured. God is here to help us in either situation.

In Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus tells us, "For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins." This is speaking about an attitude of heart and action from that attitude.

Geroge Herbert once wrote - "He who cannot forgive others breaks the brdige over which he must pass himself."